Fondazione Magnani-Rocca

Luigi Magnani was a music and art scholar, the son of a wealthy Parma landowner, who spent his life buying a small number of very great pictures for his country villa. He left it all to a foundation, and since 1990 his house at Mamiano has been open as a museum he liked to call the Villa of Masterpieces.

The name is not boasting. In a handful of rooms hang a Dürer, a Titian, a Filippo Lippi and Goya's group portrait of the family of the Infante Don Luis, the Spanish king's brother, painted with unsparing honesty. Magnani also loved the quiet still lifes of his friend Giorgio Morandi and gathered some 50 of them, one of the most important Morandi collections anywhere. Outside, an English-style park wraps around the villa, where peacocks wander among exotic trees.